NABOKV-L post 0027535, Mon, 25 Sep 2017 11:53:59 +0300

In his Commentary Kinbote (Shade’s mad commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla) mentions Baron Bland, the Keeper of the Treasure, who jumped or fell from the North Tower of the royal palace in Onhava:

However, not all Russians are gloomy, and the two young experts from Moscow whom our new government engaged to locate the Zemblan crown jewels turned out to be positively rollicking. The Extremists were right in believing that Baron Bland, the Keeper of the Treasure, had succeeded in hiding those jewels before he jumped or fell from the North Tower; but they did not know he had had a helper and were wrong in thinking the jewels must be looked for in the palace which the gentle white-haired Bland had never left except to die. I may add, with pardonable satisfaction, that they were, and still are, cached in a totally different - and quite unexpected - corner of Zembla. (note to Line 681)

Baron Bland seems to blend Alexander Blok with Brand, the title character of a play in verse (1865) by Ibsen. In the penultimate line of his poem Vozmezdie («Retribution», 1910-21) Blok mentions quantum satis Branda voli (quantum satis of strong-willed Brand):

Когда ты загнан и забит

Людьми, заботой, иль тоскою;

Когда под гробовой доскою

Всё, что тебя пленяло, спит;

Когда по городской пустыне,

Отчаявшийся и больной,

Ты возвращаешься домой,

И тяжелит ресницы иней,

Тогда - остановись на миг

Послушать тишину ночную:

Постигнешь слухом жизнь иную,

Которой днём ты не постиг;

По-новому окинешь взглядом

Даль снежных улиц, дым костра,

Ночь, тихо ждущую утра

Над белым запушённым садом,

И небо - книгу между книг;

Найдёшь в душе опустошённой

Вновь образ матери склонённый,

И в этот несравненный миг -

Узоры на стекле фонарном,

Мороз, оледенивший кровь,

Твоя холодная любовь -

Всё вспыхнет в сердце благодарном,

Ты всё благословишь тогда,

Поняв, что жизнь - безмерно боле,

Чем quantum satis Бранда воли,

А мир - прекрасен, как всегда.

When you are cornered and depressed
By people, dues or anguish.
When, underneath the coffin lid,
All that inspired you, perished;
When through the deserted town dome,
Hopeless and weak,
You're finally returning home,
And rime is on thy eyelashes, -
Then - come to rest for short-lifted flash
To hear the silence of night
You'll fathom other life by ears
That's hard to fathom at daylight
In new way you will do the glance
Of long snow streets and foam of fire,
Of night, quite waiting for the lance
Of morning in white garden, piled.
Of heaven - Book among the books
You'll find in the drained soul
Again your loving mother's look
And at this moment, peerless, sole
The patterns on the lamppost's glass
The frost, that chilled your blood
Your stone-hold love, already past
All will flare up in your heart.
Then everything you'll highly bless
You'll see that life is much greater
Than quantum satis of strong-willed Brand
And the world is beautiful as always. (chapter III)

In Latin quantum satis means “the amount which is enough.” The 999 lines of Shade’s poem look insufficient. Kinbote believes that, to be completed, Shade’s almost finished poem needs only Line 1000 (identical to Line 1: “I was the shadow of the waxwing slain”). But it also seems to need a coda (Line 1001: “By its own double in the windowpane”). Dvoynik (“The Double”) is a short novel (1846) by Dostoevski and a poem (1909) by Blok. Blok’s poem begins as follows:

Однажды в октябрьском тумане

Я брёл, вспоминая напев.

Once in the October haze

I shuffled, remembering a melody.

Bland + oktyabr’ = Blok + Brand + yat’

oktyabr’ – October; Kinbote completes his work on Shade’s poem and commits suicide on October 19, 1959 (the anniversary of Pushkin’s Lyceum)

yat’ – in the old Russian alphabet the letter ѣ (cancelled by the reform of 1918)

In VN’s play Sobytie (“The Event,” 1938) Lyubov’ (the wife of the portrait painter Troshcheykin) complains that she married the letter yat’:

Lyubov’ and Vera are the daughters of Antonina Pavlovna Opayashin, a lady writer whose name and patronymic hint at Chekhov. The characters of Chekhov’s one-act play Svad’ba (“The Wedding,” 1889) include the telegraphist Yat’. At the end of Chekhov’s play Dyadya Vanya (“Uncle Vanya,” 1898) Sonya promises to Uncle Vanya that they will see nebo v almazakh (the sky swarming with diamonds). At the end of “Retribution” Blok mentions nebo – kniga mezhdu knig (heaven – Book among books). The name of Zemblan capital, Onhava seems to hint at “heaven.”

Troshcheykin’s name and patronymic, Aleksey Maksimovich, hints at Gorki (A. M. Peshkov’s penname). The characters of Gorki’s play Na dne (“At the Bottom,” 1902) include Baron. In a letter of July 29, 1902, to Gorki Chekhov says that it is unclear why he is a Baron:

You have left out of the fourth act all the most interesting characters (except the actor), and you must mind now that there is no ill effect from it. The act may seem boring and unnecessary, especially if, with the exit of the strongest and most interesting actors, there are left only the mediocrities. The death of the actor is awful; it is as though you gave the spectator a sudden box on the ear apropos of nothing without preparing him in any way. How the baron got into the doss-house and why he is a baron is also not sufficiently clear.

One of the most interesting characters whom the author has left out of the fourth act, Luka brings to mind Caroline Lukin (the maiden name of Shade’s mother):

A Commentary where placid scholarship should reign is not the place for blasting the preposterous defects of that little obituary. I have only mentioned it because that is where I gleaned a few meager details concerning the poet's parents. His father, Samuel Shade, who died at fifty, in 1902, had studied medicine in his youth and was vice-president of a firm of surgical instruments in Exton. His chief passion, however, was what our eloquent necrologist calls "the study of the feathered tribe," adding that "a bird had been named for him: Bombycilla Shadei" (this should be "shadei," of course). The poet's mother, nee Caroline Lukin, assisted him in his work and drew the admirable figures of his Birds of Mexico, which I remember having seen in my friend's house. What the obituarist does not know is that Lukin comes from Luke, as also do Locock and Luxon and Lukashevich. It represents one of the many instances when the amorphous-looking but live and personal hereditary patronymic grows, sometimes in fantastic shapes, around the common pebble of a Christian name. The Lukins are an old Essex family. Other names derive from professions such as Rymer, Scrivener, Limner (one who illuminates parchments), Botkin (one who makes bottekins, fancy footwear) and thousands of others. (note to Line 71)

One of the main characters in Gorki’s play, Satin is a cardsharp. In his Commentary and Index Kinbote mentions Odon’s half-brother Nodo, “a cardsharp and despicable traitor.” Odon (pseudonym of Donald O’Donnell) is a world-famous actor and Zemblan patriot who helps the king to escape from Zembla. Odon = Nodo = odno (neut. of odin, “one”). There is Don (the river) in Odon and dno (bottom) in odno. Pale Fire is roman s dvoynym dnom (a novel with the false bottom), and the author is a conjurer. In his essay “On a Book Entitled Lolita” (1956) VN compares himself to a conjurer and, at the end of his Afterword, mentions the naïve illusionist:

My private tragedy, which cannot, and indeed should not, be anybody's concern, is that I had to abandon my natural idiom, my untrammeled, rich, and infinitely docile Russian tongue for a second-rate brand of English, devoid of any of those apparatuses - the baffling mirror, the black velvet backdrop, the implied associations and traditions - which the native illusionist, frac-tails flying, can magically use to transcend the heritage in his own way.

In his Foreword to “Retribution” Blok mentions those infinitely high qualities that once shined like luchshie almazy v chelovecheskoy korone (the best diamonds in man’s crown), such as humanism, virtues, impeccable honesty, rectitude, etc.:

The epigraph to “Retribution,” Yunost’ – eto vozmezdie (Youth is retribution), is from Ibsen’s play “The Master Builder” (1892). In his Index to Pale Fire Kinbote mentions a very courageous master builder who was poisoned, together with his three young apprentices (Yan, Yonny, and Angeling):

Shadows, the, a regicidal organization which commissioned Gradus (q.v.) to assassinate the self-banished king; its leader's terrible name cannot be mentioned, even in the Index to the obscure work of a scholar; his maternal grandfather, a well-known and very courageous master builder, was hired by Thurgus the Turgid, around 1885, to make certain repairs in his quarters, and soon after that perished, poisoned in the royal kitchens, under mysterious circumstances, together with his three young apprentices whose pretty first names Yan, Yonny, and Angeling, are preserved in a ballad still to be heard in some of our wilder valleys.

The name Yonny seems to hint at Ionov, a Bolshevik who, according to G. Ivanov (the author of extremely unreliable memoirs “The St. Petersburg Winters”), visited Blok a few days before the poet’s death:

In his deathbed delirium Blok asked his wife to destroy all copies of his poem Dvenadtsat’ (“The Twelve,” 1918). In his memoir essay Tretiy Tolstoy (“The Third Tolstoy,” 1949) Ivan (“Yan,” as his wife Vera Muromtsev called him) Bunin mentions “the Great October Revolution,” Lunacharski (the minister of education in Lenin’s government) and Blok’s poem “The Twelve:”

In his speech on Dostoevski (delivered on the hundredth anniversary of the writer’s birth) Lunacharski, in order to explain Dostoevski’s treatment of man’s psyche, takes the example of water and mentions the Niagara:

According to Kinbote, the (probably fictitious) names of the two Soviet experts invited by the new Zemblan government are Andronnikov and Niagarin. Andronnikov is a character in Dostoevski’s novel Podrostok (“The Adolescent,” 1875). Ulichnyi podrostok (“The Street Adolescent,” 1914) is a sonnet with the coda by G. Ivanov.

Lunacharski compares Dostoevski to Michelangelo. At the end of Pushkin’s Mozart and Salieri (1830) Salieri mentions Buonarotti:

You will sleep
For long, Mozart! But what if he is right?
I am no genius? "Genius and evildoing
Are incompatibles." That is not true:
And Buonarotti?.. Or is it a legend
Of the dull-witted, senseless crowd -- while really
The Vatican's creator was no murderer? (scene II)

If only all so quickly felt the power
of harmony! But no, in that event
the world could not exist; none would care
about the needs of ordinary life,
all would give themselves to free art. (ibid.)

Nikto b is Botkin (Shade’s, Kinbote’s and Gradus’ “real” name) backwards. An American scholar of Russian descent, Professor Vsevolod Botkin went mad and became Shade, Kinbote and Gradus after the suicide of his daughter Nadezhda. In “The Event” Antonina Pavlovna tells Eleonora Shnap that she has two daughters, Lyubov’ (Love) and Vera (Faith), but, alas, no Nadezhda (Hope):

Yonny brings to mind not only Ionov, but also the hero of Chekhov’s story Ionych (1898). Ionych is Dr Startsev’s patronymic. As she speaks to Dr Startsev, Kitten (a character in Chekhov’s story) mentions Pisemski’s amusing patronymic:

Blok compares Pobedonostsev (the Ober-Procurator of the Holy Synod) to koldun (sorcerer), volshebnik (enchanter) and an owl and mentions ten’ ogromnykh kryl (the shadow of huge wings) over Russia. The characters of VN’s story Lik (1939) include Oleg Petrovich Koldunov, Lik’s former schoolmate and tormentor. Like Odon, Lik (the story’s main character) is an actor. Volshebnik (“The Enchanter,” 1939) is story by VN, Lolita’s Russian predecessor.

In his fragment Rim (“Rome,” 1842) Gogol describes a carnival in Rome and mentions the Italian sonetto colla coda (sonnet with a coda), explaining in a footnote what a coda is. According to G. Ivanov, when he asked Blok “does a sonnet need a coda,” Blok replied that he did not know what a coda is:

Baron Bland’s end brings to mind the heroine’s death in Dostoevski’s story Krotkaya (“A Gentle Creature,” 1876) and Luzhin’s death in VN’s novel Zashchita Luzhina (“The Luzhin Defense,” 1930). Luzhin is a character in Dostoevski’s Prestuplenie i nakazanie (“Crime and Punishment,” 1867). In VN’s novel Alexander Ivanovich Luzhin is a chess maestro. In Chapter One of “Retribution” Blok mentions all those who ceased to be a pawn and whom the authorities hasten to transform into rooks or knights:

И власть торопится скорей

Всех тех, кто перестал быть пешкой,

В тур превращать, или в коней...

Tura (the obsolete word for “rook” used by Blok) and tower (cf. the North Tower from which Baron Bland jumped or fell) are related words. In his Commentary Kinbote mentions Oswin Bretwit, a diplomat whose surname means “chess intelligence.” As to the name Oswin, it brings to mind sovinye kryla (an owl’s wings that Pobedonostsev spread over Russia). Gradus visits Oswin Bretwit in Paris and offers him a bundle of family papers:

The activities of Gradus in Paris had been rather neatly planned by the Shadows. They were perfectly right in assuming that not only Odon but our former counsul in Paris, the late Oswin Bretwit, would know where to find the King. They decided to have Gradus try Bretwit first. That gentleman had a flat in Meudon where he dwelt alone, seldom going anywhere except the National Library (where he read theosophic works and solved chess problems in old newspapers), and did not receive visitors. The Shadows' neat plan sprung from a piece of luck. Suspecting that Gradus lacked the mental equipment and mimic gifts necessary for the impersonation of an enthusiastic Royalist, they suggested he had better pose as a completely apolitical commissioner, a neutral little man interested only in getting a good price for various papers that private parties had asked him to take out of Zembla and deliver to their rightful owners. Chance, in one of its anti-Karlist moods, helped. One of the lesser Shadows whom we shall call Baron A. had a father-in-law called Baron B., a harmless old codger long retired from the civil service and quite incapable of understanding certain Renaissance aspects of the new regime. He had been, or thought he had been (retrospective distance magnifies things), a close friend of the late Minister of Foreign Affairs, Oswin Bretwit's father, and therefore was looking forward to the day when he would be able to transmit to "young" Oswin (who, he understood, was not exactly persona grata with the new regime) a bundle of precious family papers that the dusty baron had come across by chance in the files of a governmental office. All at once he was informed that now the day had come: the documents would be immediately forwarded to Paris. He was also allowed to prefix a brief note to them which read:

Here are some precious papers belonging to your family. I cannot do better than place them in the hands of the son of the great man who was my fellow student in Heidelburg and my teacher in the diplomatic service. Verba volant, scripta manent.

The scripta in question were two hundred and thirteen long letters which had passed some seventy years ago between Zule Bretwit, Oswin's grand-uncle, Mayor of Odevalla, and a cousin of his Ferz Bretwit, Mayor of Aros. This correspondence, a dismal exchange of bureaucratic platitudes and fustian jokes, was devoid of even such parochial interest as letters of this sort may possess in the eyes of a local historian--but of course there is no way of telling what will repel or attract a sentimental ancestralist--and this was what Oswin Bretwit had always been known to be by his former staff. I would like to take time out here to interrupt this dry commentary and pay a brief tribute to Oswin Bretwit. (note to Line 286)

Ferz’ is Russian for “chess queen.” In a letter of the second half of January - 14 February, 1825, to Katenin Griboedov calls Sofia (a character in Griboedov’s play “Woe from Wit,” 1824) ferz’: